Social and Technological Change
La formación de científicos, ingenieros y posgraduados ocupa un lugar central en el debate sobre el desarrollo y la integración regional.
Regarding the university, there are fashionable subjects, such as links with private enterprise, that receive attention disproportionate to their local importance compared with other subjects that are forgotten. Greater attention should be paid to the university’s problem stricto sensu: educating people. As for links with companies, if the university educated its graduates well, it would not need to concern itself with other forms of transfer. We sadly observe the crisis in basic disciplines and the proliferation of redundant ones. Believe it or not, four or five mathematicians graduate from the University of Buenos Aires each year, while thousands graduate in computing, accounting and communication sciences. We see the deterioration of teaching and the lack of a clear direction for undertaking fundamental changes in postgraduate education, at the master’s and doctoral levels. We need to train qualified personnel intensively, particularly postgraduates. An adequate pool of women and men with a scientific foundation is crucial given the speed of social and technological change. A strong intellectual workforce in science and engineering would allow the country to reduce the risk of falling dramatically behind in the contemporary revolution. Adopting this as an objective may be the only decision with a self-correcting capacity that can be made within the cultural system.
It is necessary to eliminate the tendency to take the easy way out in academic requirements and the Malthusian approach to postgraduate education. We must multiply budget allocations for domestic and overseas scholarships, saving wherever possible and requiring the government and those who give it its mandate to substantially increase the available funds.
With Mercosur, we are beginning a new chapter in history; we know that well. But we must recognize that, since initial conditions determine the eventual shape of every cultural undertaking, integration with Brazil presents a crucial problem from the standpoint of each society’s relative capabilities. That problem is that, as a consequence of our neighbors’ dynamism and our own passivity over the past 25 years, an asymmetry already exists between our respective science and technology systems. They have expanded their institutions, professional ranks and management capacity. They have matched our standards in basic sciences and far surpassed them in technologies such as computing, space, materials and mining, to name just a few. Their numbers of doctoral and master’s degree holders exceed ours by a proportion far greater than the differences in population and national product.
The almost explosive growth in the number of scientists and technologists in Brazil and the minimal growth in Argentina point to an increasing imbalance in potential that makes balanced integration ever more difficult. When we speak of hundreds of scholarship recipients, they speak of thousands. In the past decade, for example, while our CONICET was sending 120 abroad, Brazil’s overseas scholarship program aimed for 3,000 in 1987, 8,000 in 1988 and 10,000 in 1989. Even if those targets were somewhat optimistic, “Brazilian style,” achieving only part of them would have been more than significant. The fact is that there are telling indications of results: just a few days ago, a leading Argentine physicist who has lived in Rio since 1966 and received Brazil’s highest scientific distinction this year told us: “At any scientific meeting we hold here or there, for every Argentine specialist there are a dozen or two of them. They are leaving us behind!”
We should ask ourselves what capacity an unchanged Argentina would have to work on equal terms within Mercosur alongside a Brazil with several tens of thousands of people possessing the strongest scientific and technical training. In our country, we have the illusion that we possess high-quality and relatively abundant human resources. At the level of public awareness, this is partly the result of the survival of certain past realities and quite a few myths. For example, the legacy of immigration, the old public school system and the university’s “scientistic” period. At some historical moment, this may have been relatively close to the truth. But it is mistaken in these demanding times, which require different capabilities from those needed by a simpler society, such as the one that existed before the Second World War.
The reality is that we have very few groups of international standing in important scientific fields and almost entirely lack technological groups of any international significance. The few outstanding individuals in basic sciences conceal the fact that the pool of people is small. These disciplines are highly vulnerable: the emigration or departure of just a few scientists in sensitive sectors can at any moment create a gap that is virtually impossible to repair for a long time. To give a few examples: we have hardly any marine biologists, oceanographers, bioengineers or molecular biologists; applied mathematicians and statisticians are scarce; we have no significant neuroscience or ecological science activity; entire branches of the new engineering disciplines and technologies are empty, and there is little development in materials and space technology, electronics and computing; we lack anthropologists and linguists… Curiously, however, the myths persist among us. Some politicians assert that Argentina’s scientific and technological capacity exceeds the country’s economic importance, pointing to its Nobel Prizes in science as evidence. And a Sunday columnist in the newspaper “La Nación,” analyzing Mercosur’s future, wrote candidly:
“Brazil represents quantity; Argentina, quality. In social indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality, enrollment in primary and, above all, secondary education, nutrition and literacy—in everything involving per capita measurement—we comfortably surpass the Brazilians. Our annual gross product per capita is 7,700 dollars; Brazil’s is 3,300. More than double.”
This is the kind of reasoning that in logic we call “fallacies,” which are classified in various ways. For is a “quality” of that kind really what will matter in enabling our country to achieve balance once we have advanced in the process of socioeconomic integration with Brazil? Will the number, capacity and mobility of our respective scientific, engineering, business and cultural elites not be more decisive? Given that, as already stated—and as our physicist friend vividly pointed out, as mentioned above—it is perfectly clear that our neighboring country is pulling ahead in the number and quality of postgraduates and in research and development activities, one cannot help being alarmed by the lack of information and short-sightedness of our leaders and those who guide public opinion.
